Calm Response

While many larger organizations have cut technology spending over the past 18 months or so, mid-sized businesses have always had fewer resources to build and manage the critical solutions they need. In addition, many companies are hesitant to increase staff size or make capital investments in an uncertain economic environment. Now, organizations of all sizes are turning to another option:  using managed services can both contain costs and deliver the technology to compete effectively with firms of all sizes.

With the right provider, a medium-sized business can enjoy the same service levels as a Fortune 500 company, without the costs of building and maintaining an in-house solution.

Affordability Issues
At a seminar earlier this summer, I spoke with the CIO of a medium-sized service firm. His data footprint was growing rapidly at all locations: at the data center, at a satellite office, and on employee laptops. He knew he needed a new data backup strategy for his organization, but wasn’t sure if they could afford to do anything in the current year. Then we discussed in greater detail his needs and the options available, examining his total cost of ownership.

Beyond Development Costs
Investment decisions often focus on the development costs, a significant share of a homegrown solution. But to understand the full cost of a do-it-yourself approach, CIOs should also include the following expenses:

• Hardware and Software:  Cash and credit are both tight these days, making it hard to cover the upfront capital expenditures needed for an in-house solution. Factor in depreciation, licenses, and other costs to understand the full impact.
• Additional Staffing: While pundits debate our economic future, few firms are prepared to embark on a new hiring spree. An in-house solution may require additional staffing and training, or deter existing staffers from focusing on other pressing strategic initiatives.
• Infrastructure: Network, design and capacity upgrades may be necessary to keep pace with data growth.
• Facilities: Floor space, maintenance, and (volatile) energy costs are often overlooked but can quickly deplete a budget.

In light of these sometimes unpredictable costs, the service firm CIO soon decided that a turnkey service was the right approach to implementing the backup he needed this year. 

Save the Way to High Quality
By eliminating or reducing most or all of the in-house expenses, mid-sized businesses can afford a solution of the highest quality and reliability, without the risks on a do-it-yourself project. According to a recent IDC study on disaster recovery, companies that leverage an in-house model spend 32% more than those opting to outsource.

Will managed services meet your particular need? Ask potential vendors to show how they’ve reduced customers’ TCO or can provide savings on specific budget line items. In addition, a cloud-based service can deliver the efficiency, availability, and scalability needed for a rapidly changing business environment. If you’d like to find out more, I’d be happy to answer your questions about these options.

 

When the economy takes a downward turn, company IT budgets are usually one of the first casualties. This is the case with the current recession, as evidenced by an October 2008 CIO Magazine survey in which 40 percent of 234 IT chiefs surveyed said they are cutting spending, essentially freezing new IT initiatives, if not scrapping them altogether.

However, technology is a critical element of business, and despite the current economic climate, the need for reliable IT remains the same—especially when it comes to IT Maintenance or fundamental business applications such as email or customer relationship management (CRM). As companies across all industries face tough decisions about where to put their limited funds, Managed Services, hosted or "software as a service" (SaaS) model makes a great deal of sense.

How do Calm Response define Managed Services?

Any Proactive Services that are Remotely Delivered and Prepaid For, on a Recurring Basis.

If you would like to know more about how managed services can benefit your company, please contact us at Calm Response.

This article written by  Daniel Rabbitt, IBM GTS Worldwide Marketing Manager for Business Continuity and Resiliency Services and appeared on infoboom.com

Today's datacenters face major challenges as they run out of space and power at the same time they struggle to keep pace with relentless change. Gartner Research estimates that power will be the second highest operating cost in 70% of datacenters by 2009. To complicate matters, power prices continue to rise, representing a significant risk to growth if usage remains unchecked. In today's tough economy, managers work harder than ever to reduce costs while continuing to maintain high availability. These manipulations strain budgets, forcing managers to find ways to use existing resources more efficiently. Yet, datacenter operators must still deploy new applications to allow the organization to grow.

Datacenters are so complex that every decision — such as where to deploy the next application and associated server — affects the entire system. Meanwhile automation, thanks to new technology like virtualization, amplifies the impact of these changes. As a result, the delicate balance between finite resources such as power and cooling, and overall system availability and utilization could be thrown off by one poor decision. In fact, a single misinformed change can cause service outages and lost productivity. In order to regain control of these precious assets, datacenter operators require visibility into these critical interactions — a visibility that hasn't existed until now.

Register now to slash your power and cooling expense. Try Viridity and gain a blueprint for more efficient and greener datacenter operations.

A datacenter startup exiting stealth mode with technology that reduces power and cooling costs by analyzing the energy consumption of IT equipment and applications.

Officials at Viridity Software -- the name means "greenness" -- argue that today's power monitoring products focus only on the physical infrastructure, giving insight into how power is delivered to the data center but not insight into why it is being consumed.

If you are interested in identifying Cost Saving areas within your own company's IT Business infrastructure, contact Calm Response

For further information on how Calm Response can help you explore the productivity opportunities offered by Unified Communications:

• Voice
• Video
• Email
• Social Networking

contact your Account Manager at Calm Response

or To download the material directly from NEC

The flexible Cloud/SaaS model is based around scaling the software up or down with your business. Hosted solutions allow you to add users on demand and remove them on demand. You pay on a monthly basis only for active users. And in a down economy, the likelihood of having to lay off active users goes up, which is why this approach makes sense when business is slow. 

A SaaS model also allows you to add and remove software, not just users, on demand. For example, you could lease SharePoint just for a special six-month project. Or you could decide that your business just can’t afford mobile connectivity for every user right now. In an on-premise solution, you have already paid for the functionality, so you’re in a “use it or lose it” situation. In the SaaS model, you can turn off mobile connectivity, and then turn it back on in three months when cash isn’t as tight.

InfoClipz: Cloud computing
Internet-based services now allow businesses to add computer power, store data, use browser-based applications, and even develop Web applications without purchasing new hardware or software.

The flexible Cloud/SaaS model is based around scaling the software up or down with your business. Hosted solutions allow you to add users on demand and remove them on demand. You pay on a monthly basis only for active users. And in a down economy, the likelihood of having to lay off active users goes up, which is why this approach makes sense when business is slow. 

A SaaS model also allows you to add and remove software, not just users, on demand. For example, you could lease SharePoint just for a special six-month project. Or you could decide that your business just can’t afford mobile connectivity for every user right now. In an on-premise solution, you have already paid for the functionality, so you’re in a “use it or lose it” situation. In the SaaS model, you can turn off mobile connectivity, and then turn it back on in three months when cash isn’t as tight.

For further information on how Calm Response can help you, please contact us

Gmail has increased the maximum attachment size to 25 MB in June, but some people want to send larger files. Daniel wrote a thoughtful comment that explains why it's a bad idea to send huge files by email:

People who demand large message size limits rarely understand the limitations of the email transmission.

Because of the MIME encoding used when sending binary attachments, your files expand 33% when sent via email. In other words, a 15MB attachment requires 20MB plus the message text, plus message headers.

When you carbon copy 20 of your friends & coworkers, a separate message is sent to each. 20MB x 20 = 400MB. That's half a freaking CD.

If 5 of those friends are on the same small company email server, downloading those messages saturates the entire bandwidth of their T1 data line for nearly 9 minutes. Because each message has separate headers, it isn't easily cached and gets completely downloaded by each recipient.

Compare this to uploading the same attachment to a web server, FTP server, file transmission service like YouSendIt, or video streaming site like YouTube. One copy is uploaded. The download is typically 8-bit so minimal expansion factor. The small business' network can cache the content, so it's only downloaded once then fetched locally from the web caching server.

Bottom line, sending a large attachment via email is relocating using the U.S. Postal Service as your moving company. It is painful, limited, and expensive.

excellent technical breakdown of why IT don't want you doing this

Helping Others Go Green

Google is continually developing tools and services to help our users “go green.”

• Saving Energy
• Saving Energy
• Education
• Education
• Google Maps
• Google Maps
• Google Earth
• Google Earth

We've developed a Google Desktop gadget for Windows XP and Vista that helps you save energy by minimizing your PC's power consumption when it's not actively in use. The Energy Saver gadget will automatically enable and optimize your Windows power settings to EPA recommended standards. It will also show you how much energy you've saved – and how much energy everyone who is using the gadget has saved collectively. All you need to do is make sure you have Google Desktop up and running and then install the Energy Saver gadget.

 

You've got to get someplace - the airport, out to dinner, work - and you want to do your part to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Check out the transit trip planning or the walking directions features of Google Maps. The transit planner uses all available public transportation schedules to plot out the most efficient possible step-by-step itinerary.

You can use Google Maps to organize your very own green events. In October 2007, for example, we virtually hosted an International Clean Up Weekend and invited people around the world to create their own local cleanups with family and friends.

Our users have also applied Google Maps technology to create various environmental “mashups” that demonstrate effects of the climate crisis. For instance, you can view a map that shows where coastal flooding would occur with various changes in sea levels or explore climate data for cities around the world.

Finally, if you live in the United Kingdom, you can install a personalized carbon calculator right on your iGoogle homepage. This tool uses Google Maps technology to help you to calculate, track, compare and update your very own carbon footprint.

Google Earth's satellite imagery, terrain, and 3D buildings bring you cutting-edge information on world geography – including the geographic impact of climate change. For example, the United Nations Environment Program has created the "Atlas of our Changing Environment" to show pictures, such as the deforestation in Brazil or the shrinking of Lake Chad in Africa. Or check out the layer created by NRDC and Audubon that aggregates sensitive areas to make it easier for renewable energy developers to find optimal places to site clean energy projects.

And while you're exploring Earth, be sure to check out some of the latest Global Awareness layers (found in the left-side "Layers" panel) that celebrate the beauty and biodiversity on Earth, like ARKive's Endangered Species and Greenpeace's Stop Climate Change. We also encourage you to visit the Google Earth Outreach Showcase, which features a number of environmentally-focused KMLs that can be downloaded and viewed in Google Earth.

 

Google SketchUp has created a site for green design professionals, and Google for Educators has put together some recommendations for teachers who want to use Google Earth and Maps to teach about environmental issues in the classroom.

Our intention is to provide our followers with options to conserve power and save Money both in the home and in the office!

According to research, two-thirds of the energy used by PCs and monitors is wasted when the computer is not in use. What’s more, according to Gartner, your PCs are the single-largest contributor to the organization’s IT carbon footprint.

If you would like to know more about:

• How thousands of organizations like yours are already making a significant contribution to their company’s sustainability initiatives by eliminating energy waste on their networked PCs?
• How a 1,000-PC organization, can obtain more than £25,000 in annual cost savings, and reduce their carbon footprint by over 10,000 metric tons of CO2 annually.

Contact  the GreenIT at Calm Response

PLEASE ENSURE YOU HAVE YOUR VOLUME TURNED DOWN :-) Out thanks to @innovate: @mattscoble @bernierjohn for this.